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Featured Replies

2 minutes ago, maninblack said:

How many years have you been banned from the Champions League?

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LOL, stealing this for sure.

That’s ok, at least we won’t get eliminated in a soul crushing method like usual.

How many years have you been banned from the Champions League?
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This thread is 11 months old and had some really good points. 
 


 

City’s reported commercial revenues have been laughably inflated/cooked for years. 

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https://amp.theguardian.com/football/2020/feb/14/leaked-emails-and-invoices-led-to-manchester-city-ban-from-champions-league-europe-uefa

 

First, and most damaging, were emails and accounting documents which appeared to show that City’s owner, Sheikh Mansour, of the Abu Dhabi ruling family, was mostly funding the huge, £67.5m annual sponsorship of the club’s shirt, stadium and academy by his country’s airline, Etihad. That created a perception that the Abu Dhabi hierarchy, in their drive to mega-spend on City attaining elite status while somehow complying with FFP rules, had deceived Uefa in their financial submissions.


One of the emails, from City’s then chief financial officer, Jorge Chumillas, headed “Cashflow”, stated that Mansour’s own company vehicle, the Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG), would be paying £57m as a “contribution to 13/14 sponsorship fee”, while only £8m was Etihad’s “direct contribution”. Then Chumillas sent invoices for Etihad, internally to the City executives Ferran Soriano and Simon Pearce, stating that for 2015-16, the Etihad sponsorship was £67.5m, of which “£8m should be funded directly by Etihad and £59.5 [sic] by ADUG”.

hmm, so 5th place in pl now gets into champions league?

season just came back to life for everton, tottenham, and united.

Wow....cant believe they actually got hit

Everyone will be jumping ship now, so long city

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City already appealed to CAS, doubt it gets ruled on in time for 2020-21 CL. I guess they could try and expedite it though. 

10 minutes ago, shnsajax said:

So where does Pep land next?

Odds on favorite is Juve

1 minute ago, maninblack said:

Odds on favorite is Juve

I've been trying to decide who is more desperate to win the CL other than City, and Juve and PSG are the immediate two. 

PSG would love him but I don't think he wants to manage in a farmers league

The tweets above are helpful, but can someone dumb down for me what their advantage was? Is there a Cam Newton out there who obviously got them trophies they wouldn't have won otherwise?

If it's just a matter of City secretly having more to spend on salaries, how would that not be obvious right away? Aren't all the salaries and transfer fees made public?

1 hour ago, maninblack said:

How many years have you been banned from the Champions League?

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LOL.

9 minutes ago, Bartles said:

The tweets above are helpful, but can someone dumb down for me what their advantage was? Is there a Cam Newton out there who obviously got them trophies they wouldn't have won otherwise?

If it's just a matter of City secretly having more to spend on salaries, how would that not be obvious right away? Aren't all the salaries and transfer fees made public?

Simplistically said, a club is only allowed to spend as much as they earn.  MC claimed that their earnings where greater than they were by inflating their income from sponsorships.  This allowed them to spend more on players then they otherwise would have been able to do.

https://amp.theguardian.com/football/2020/feb/14/leaked-emails-and-invoices-led-to-manchester-city-ban-from-champions-league-europe-uefa
 
First, and most damaging, were emails and accounting documents which appeared to show that City’s owner, Sheikh Mansour, of the Abu Dhabi ruling family, was mostly funding the huge, £67.5m annual sponsorship of the club’s shirt, stadium and academy by his country’s airline, Etihad. That created a perception that the Abu Dhabi hierarchy, in their drive to mega-spend on City attaining elite status while somehow complying with FFP rules, had deceived Uefa in their financial submissions.

One of the emails, from City’s then chief financial officer, Jorge Chumillas, headed “Cashflow”, stated that Mansour’s own company vehicle, the Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG), would be paying £57m as a “contribution to 13/14 sponsorship fee”, while only £8m was Etihad’s “direct contribution”. Then Chumillas sent invoices for Etihad, internally to the City executives Ferran Soriano and Simon Pearce, stating that for 2015-16, the Etihad sponsorship was £67.5m, of which “£8m should be funded directly by Etihad and £59.5 [sic] by ADUG”.


Side note - Sheikh Mansour was partially involved in the largest financial theft in world history via the Malaysian sovereign fund MTB a few years ago.
28 minutes ago, Bartles said:

The tweets above are helpful, but can someone dumb down for me what their advantage was? Is there a Cam Newton out there who obviously got them trophies they wouldn't have won otherwise?

If it's just a matter of City secretly having more to spend on salaries, how would that not be obvious right away? Aren't all the salaries and transfer fees made public?

City's sponsors are essentially owned by City's owner. If they had a shortfall that left them in violation of FFP they just "signed a new deal" that magically covered the amount they needed. They also sold the image rights of City players to a shell Corporation owned by City's owner. All their deals have been for way above market value. They have effectively been making up numbers to make the accounts work.

Edited by Schulz2.0

So this is more like an Ole Miss football or SMU basketball where it's like, there's no way you're this good without cheating and sure enough they were (though SMU was kinda bullshit charges imo)

It's a start.  PSG should be next and there should probably be more bannings beyond that.

1 hour ago, WBT said:

It's a start.  PSG should be next and there should probably be more bannings beyond that.

I'm not sure PSG was dumb enough to have internal emails detailing how the payments fudging numbers were to go down. 

2 hours ago, Schulz2.0 said:

I'm not sure PSG was dumb enough to have internal emails detailing how the payments fudging numbers were to go down. 

hence should and not will

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4 hours ago, Schulz2.0 said:

I'm not sure PSG was dumb enough to have internal emails detailing how the payments fudging numbers were to go down. 


per The Athletic:

“It is also likely they will use the result of an investigation against Paris Saint-Germain. This was eventually dismissed when the same UEFA prosecutor who has acted in this case, Yves Leterme, decided that the value of PSG’s sponsorships were more or less at the value that PSG declared — despite an independent valuation suggesting they were worth much less. Even other key figures at UEFA were understood to have been alarmed by that decision, and City are sure to have monitored it.”

 

Lots of Qatari’s in charge of UEFA/FIFA and PSG are Quasi-state owned by Qatar. 

16 hours ago, sidis said:

season just came back to life for ... united.

What are you talking about? Sheffield playing with passion all season!

Has anyone traced the money back to specific player transfers/salaries that they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to afford? Or was it spread around? So much data analytics these days, I wonder if they can estimate what City’s record might have looked like without the extra cash.

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31 minutes ago, Buzzrock said:

Has anyone traced the money back to specific player transfers/salaries that they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to afford? Or was it spread around? So much data analytics these days, I wonder if they can estimate what City’s record might have looked like without the extra cash.

 

It was across the board. This isn’t the first time they’ve been caught. UEFA caught them dead to rights in 2014 but only handed out a pathetic fine. No idea why the FA has waited so long to start looking into this. 
 

Roberto Mancini (coach) got paid £30m off the books. Their peers wages/salaries rose 60% over a 5 year period; City who were signing some of the best and most expensive talent in the world only had their wages rise 16% over the same period. Here’s an article about the shady imaging rights deal they were doing.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKCN1NB2S5

 

Etihad Airlines which has lost billions year over year as a business was one of the biggest £££ corporate sponsors in world football. The e-mails show that they were only putting up about 10% of the stated £ amount of sponsorship, the rest of the money was coming straight from Mansour. I’d assume that any commercial deal that City has signed with a UAE based business in the last 12 years is dirty. 

 

9 hours ago, Buzzrock said:

Has anyone traced the money back to specific player transfers/salaries that they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to afford...

I think that this is the messed up part of "Financial Fair Play" technically with their ownership, they can afford this whole team. But there is FFP. Clearly Man City is the blueprint that if a deep pocketed owner wanted to, he can buy a team, dump a ton of money into them and turn it into a winner. This is the story of City, who were in England's tier THREE just 20 years ago!

 

I get why the rules are there. All you have to do is look at clubs like Bury, Coventry, Parma, etc that went bankrupt. But I can't help but feel that these rules are designed to keep little clubs little and prevent them from pulling a City and just buying titles.

 

Make no mistake though - FUCK CITY.

Edited by Captain Ron

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